According to Neil Seldman, president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a non-profit that promotes sustainable communities, the first two programs were in Madison, Wisconsin and Marblehead, Massachusetts.
As far as we can tell, there are no consumer-marketed electric can crushers. But that’s no tragedy. Why waste fossil fuel-generated electricity when human power will do the job just fine? One of the most practical models we’ve seen is the MultiCrush Can Compactor available for $23 from Planet Natural.
The Bush Administration Packs the Courts with Anti-Environmental Judges For more than 30 years, environmental laws ranging from the Clean Air Act to the Endangered Species Act have provided a formidable weapon for activists and ordinary citizens trying to protect the environment. While the environment does not always prevail in court, litigation has become an […]
Was Global Warming Responsible for the Deadly Heat? By the end of Europe’s staggering summer heat wave, Budapest’s ornate bridges were looking strange. They stood high above the water, their supporting foundations exposed, looking as if they were all standing on tiptoes. Rarely seen boulders jutted out from the brown surface of the Danube and […]
A Radioactive Nightmare in Concord, Massachusetts The waitress at the ice cream shop in Concord, Massachusetts was surprised. "A Superfund site?" she asked, incredulous, "on Main Street?" Not just a Superfund site—a Superfund site that a cleanup contractor has dubbed "near the tip of the peak in terms of [cleanup] difficulty." A radioactive Superfund site. […]
When Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, the goal was to force industries to reduce the flow of pollution into the nation’s waterways. Thirty years later, new applications of the law are raising questions. For instance, what happens if the pipe from which the pollution flows is up in the air, attached to […]
Described as a "living theater of plants and people," the Eden Project is an international visitor attraction set in a former clay quarry in Cornwall, England. The focus of the 280,000-square-foot gardens is on the two giant greenhouses, which simulate Mediterranean and tropical climates for trees and plants. Once described as a "giant blanc-mange [pudding] […]
Armed with good humor and lots of insect repellant, a group of Cornell University students, staff, faculty spent last summer building a “toad tunnel”…
For many Washingtonians, the Potomac River is a symbol of patriotic charm and serene beauty. Slicing through two states, it’s the envy of both Marylanders and Virginians, who still carry on a century-old legal battle over which state can have "control" of the river. The Anacostia River in Washington, DC suffered from decades of neglect.©PAUL […]
Confronting Growth and the Environment There’s a minefield in the American environmental movement, and its name is population. Because negotiating that minefield is so dangerous, many environmental groups and leaders have stopped trying to cross it. But to ignore population as a central issue while talking freely about sprawl, air and water pollution, loss of […]
